Smartosity.

There’s a lot to be said for the holiday season: the smell of fresh cut Christmas trees, the crunch of new fallen snow underfoot, that special acid reflux that’s unique to eggnog with rum… ,really, it’s an endless cornucopia of sensorial treats when you think about it.

Even better though, as any parent will tell you, is that adding kids to the mix not only lets you hand down those cherished holiday traditions, but provides an excuse to create new ones. ,(Traditions, not kids. Although creating kids is fun too, if you like that sort of thing.) ,Anyway, what was I going on about? ,Oh yeah, new traditions. ,So…, yesterday we not only put up our tree and trimmed it with the usual jumble of shiny, but I also took the opportunity to play Mr. Science and showed the boys how to use a little bit of science foo to de-tarnish the silver ornaments.

To wit: ,rather than slogging it out in the trenches fighting the tarnish on it’s own territory with polishers and such, we simply dropped the ornaments in some hot water with a piece of aluminum foil and some baking soda. It’s the nuclear option, if you will. So, two minutes and an electrochemical reaction worthy of Beakman later, all that unsightly silver sulfide had jumped ship and made it’s way over to the aluminum foil in the form of aluminum sulfide. Fickle stuff, that sulfide is.

So there it is, a new kind of holiday tradition; ,one that celebrates brains over brawn, or as we say around here, good old fashioned smartosity. After all, if I raise my kids to value braininess properly, maybe they’ll stay away from the eggnog.

=

P.S., Speaking of cutting xmas trees... , anybody have a good cleanup solution other than ,$&#ing turpentine? ,This year our tree was sappier than a Nora Ephron movie... ,yuck.